A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century

The book is not a very good novel, even as a fragment, and probably nothing would ever have made it so as a whole. But there is good novel-stuff in it, and it is important to a student of the novel and almost indispensable to a student of this novelist. Of the cynical papa – who, when his son comes to him in a "high-falutin" mood, requests him to go to his (the papa's) opera-box, to replace his sire with some agreeable girl-officials of that same institution, and to spend at least 200 francs on a supper for them at the Rocher – one would gladly see more. Of the barrack (or rather not-barrack) society at Nancy, the sight given, though not agreeable, is interesting, and to any one who knew something of our old army, especially before the abolition of purchase, very curious. There is no mess-room and apparently no common life at all, except on duty and at the "pension" hotel-meals, to which, – rather, it would seem, at the arbitrary will of the colonel than by "regulation," – you have to subscribe, though you may, and indeed must, live in lodgings exactly like a particulier. Of the social-political life of the place we see rather too much, for Beyle, not content with making the politics which he does not like make themselves ridiculous – or perhaps not being able to do so – himself tells us frequently that they are ridiculous, which is not equally effective. So also, instead of putting severe or "spiritual" speeches in Lucien's mouth, he tells us that they were spiritual or severe, an assurance which, of course, we receive with due politeness, but which does not give us as much personal delectation as might be supplied by the other method. No doubt this and other things are almost direct results of that preference for récit over semi-dramatic evolution of the story by deed and word, which has been noticed. But they are damaging results all the same: and, after making the fairest allowance for its incomplete condition, the thing may be said to support, even more than Lamiel does, the conclusion already based upon the self-published stories (and most of all upon that best of them, Le Rouge et le Noir) that Beyle could never have given us a thoroughly hit-off novel.

Beyle's place in the story.

Still, there is always something unfair in making use of "Remains," and for my part I do not think that, unless they are of extraordinary merit, they should ever be published. "Death should clear all scores" in this way as in others. Yet no really critical person will think the worse of Beyle's published work because of these anecdota, though they may, as actually before us, be taken as throwing some light on what is not so good in the publicata. There can be no doubt that Beyle occupies a very important position in the history of the novel, and not of the French novel only, as the first, or almost the first, analyst of the ugly for fictitious purposes, and as showing singular power in his analysis. Unfortunately his synthetic gifts were not equally great. He had strange difficulty in making his stories march; he only now and then got them to run; and though the real life of his characters has been acknowledged, it is after all a sort of "Life-in-Death," a new manifestation of the evil power of that mysterious entity whom Coleridge, if he did not discover, first named and produced in quasi-flesh, though he left us without any indication of more than one tiny and accidental part of her dread kingdom.

He has thus the position of père de famille, whether (to repeat the old joke) of a famille déplorable in the moral, not the sentimental, sense, must, I suppose, be left matter of opinion. The plentiful crop of monographs about him since M. Stryienski's Pompeian explorations and publications is in a manner – if only in a manner – justified by the numerous followers – not always or perhaps often conscious followers, and so even more important – in his footsteps. Nobody can say that the picaresque novelists, whether in their original country or when the fashion had spread, were given to berquinades or fairy-tales. Nobody can say that the tale-writers who preceded and followed them were apostles of virtue or painters of Golden-Age scenes. But, with some exceptions (chiefly Italian) among the latter, they did not, unless their aim were definitely tragical – an epithet which one could show, on irrefragable Aristotelian principles, to be rarely if ever applicable to Beyle and his school – they did not, as the common phrase goes, "take a gloomy view" only. There were cakes and ale; and the cakes did not always give internal pains, nor the ale a bad headache. As even Hazlitt (who has been selected, not without reason, as in many ways like Beyle) said of himself on his death-bed, rather to some folks' surprise though not to mine, most of the characters "had a happy life," though the happiness might be chequered: and some of them were "good." It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in Beyle's books happiness does not exist, and virtue has hardly a place. There are some characters who may be said to be neutral or "on the line"; they may be not definitely unhappy or definitely bad. But this is about as far as he ever goes in that direction. And accordingly he and his followers have the fault of one-sidedness; they may (he did) see life steadily, but they do not see it whole. There is no need to preach a sermon on the text: in this book there is full need to record the fact.146

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1

It is perhaps worth while to observe that I did not "edit" this, and that I had nothing whatever to do with any part of it except the Introduction and my earlier translation of the Chronique de Charles IX, which was, I believe, reprinted in it.

2

In very great strictness an exception should perhaps be made for notice of him, and of some others, in The Later Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh and London, 1907).

3

There will, for pretty obvious reasons, be fewer of these than in the former volume. The texts are much more accessible; there is no difficulty about the language, such as people, however unnecessarily, sometimes feel about French up to the sixteenth century; and the space is wanted for other things. If I have kept one or two of my old ones it is because they have won approval from persons whose approval is worth having, and are now out of print: while I have added one or two others – to please myself. Translations – in some cases more than one or two – already exist, for those who read English only, of nearly the whole of Balzac, of all Victor Hugo's novels, of a great many of Dumas's, and of others almost innumerable.

4

The chief exceptions are Dumas fils, the earliest, and Maupassant, the greatest except Flaubert and far more voluminous than Flaubert himself.

5

The most unexpected chorus of approval with which Volume I. was received by reviewers, and which makes me think, in regard to this, of that unpleasant song of the Koreish "After Bedr, Ohod," leaves little necessity for defending points attacked. I have made a few addenda and corrigenda to Volume I. to cover exceptions, and the "Interchapter" or its equivalent should contain something on one larger matter – the small account taken here of French criticism of the novel.

6

I wonder whether he was right, or whether the late Edward Caird was when he said, "I don't think I ever had a pupil [and he was among the first inter-collegiate-lecturers] with more of the philosophical ethos than you have. But you're too fond of getting into logical coaches and letting yourself be carried away in them." I think this was provoked by a very undergraduate essay arguing that Truth, as actually realised, was uninteresting, while the possible forms of Falsehood, as conceivably realisable in other circumstances, were of the highest interest.

7

I have to give, not only my usual thanks to Professors Elton, Ker, and Gregory Smith for reading my proofs, and making most valuable suggestions, but a special acknowledgment to Professor Ker, at whose request Miss Elsie Hitchcock most kindly looked up for me, at the British Museum, the exact title of that striking novel of M. H. Cochin (v. inf. p. 554 note). I have, in the proper places, already thanked the authorities of the Reviews above mentioned; but I should like also to recognise here the liberality of Messrs. Rivington in putting the contents of my Essays on French Novelists entirely at my disposal. And I am under another special obligation to Dr. Hagbert Wright for giving me, of his own motion, knowledge and reading of the fresh batch of seventeenth-century novels noticed below (pp. xiv-xvi).

8

Although, except in special cases, biographical notices are not given here, the reader may be reminded that she was born in 1766, the daughter of Necker and of Gibbon's early love, Susanne Curchod; married at twenty the Swedish ambassador, Baron of Staël-Holstein; sympathised at first with the Revolution, but was horrified at the murder of the king, and escaped, with some difficulty, from Paris to England, where, as well as in' Germany and at Coppet, her own house in Switzerland, she passed the time till French things settled down under Napoleon. With him she tried to get on, as a duplicate of himself in petticoats and the realm of mind. But this was clearly impossible, and she had once more to retire to Coppet. She had separated, though without positive quarrel, from her husband, whom, however, she attended on his death-bed; and the exact character of her liaisons with others, especially M. de Narbonne and Benjamin Constant, is not easy to determine. In 1812 she married, privately, a young officer, Rocca by name, returned to Paris before and after the Hundred Days, and died there in 1817.

9

I never can make up my mind whether I am more sorry that Madame Necker did not marry Gibbon or that Mademoiselle Necker did not, as was subsequently on the cards, marry Pitt. The results in either case – both, alas! could hardly have come off – would have been most curious.

10

The most obvious if not the only possible reason for this would be intended outrage, murder, and suicide; but though Valorbe is a robustious kind of idiot, he does not seem to have made up such mind as he has to this agreeable combination.

11

I forget whether other characters have been identified, but Léonce does not appear to have much in him of M. de Narbonne, Corinne's chief lover of the period, who seems to have been a sort of French Chesterfield, without the wit, which nobody denies our man, or the real good-nature which he possessed.

12

Perhaps, after all, not too many, for they all richly deserve it.

13

Eyes like the Ravenswing's, "as b-b-big as billiard balls" and of some brightness, are allowed her, but hardly any other good point.

14

I never pretended to be an art-critic, save as complying with Blake's negative injunction or qualification "not to be connoisseured out of my senses," and I do not know what is the technical word in the arts of design corresponding to διανοια in literature.

15

I hope this iteration may not seem too damnable. It is intended to bring before the reader's mind the utterly willowish character of Oswald, Lord Nelvil. The slightest impact of accident will bend down, the weakest wind of circumstance blow about, his plans and preferences.

16

That he seems to have unlimited leave is not perhaps, for a peer in the period, to be cavilled at; the manner in which he alternately breaks blood-vessels and is up to fighting in the tropics may be rather more so.

17

As I may have remarked elsewhere, they often seem to confuse it with "priggishness," "cant," and other amiable cosas de Inglaterra. (The late M. Jules Lemaître, as Professor Ker reminds me, even gave the picturesque but quite inadequate description: "Le snob est un mouton de Panurge prétentieux, un mouton qui saute à la file, mais d'un air suffisant.") We cannot disclaim the general origin, but we may protest against confusion of the particular substance.

18

Corinne, ou l'Italie.

19

If anybody thinks Wilhelm Meister or the Wahlverwandtschaften a good novel, I am his very humble servant in begging to differ. Freytag's Soll und Haben is perhaps the nearest approach; but, on English or French standards, it could only get a fair second class.

20

Corinne "walks and talks" (as the lady in the song was asked to do, but without requiring the offer of a blue silk gown) with her Oswald all over the churches and palaces and monuments of Rome, "doing" also Naples, Venice, etc.

21

She was rather proud of these mighty members: and some readers may recall that not least Heinesque remark of the poet who so much shocks Kaiser Wilhelm II., "Those of the Venus of Milo are not more beautiful."

22

Including also a third short story, Le Dernier Abencérage, which belongs, constructively, rather to the Voyages. It is in a way the liveliest (at least the most "incidented") of all, but not the most interesting, and with very little temporal colour, though some local. It may, however, be taken as another proof of Chateaubriand's importance in the germinal way, for it starts the Romantic interest in Spanish things. The contrast with the dirty rubbish of Pigault-Lebrun's La Folie Espagnole is also not negligible.

23

For the mother, in a fashion which the good Father-missionary most righteously and indignantly denounces as unchristian, had staked her own salvation on her daughter's obedience to the vow.

24

Its author, in the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, expressed a warm wish that he had never written it, and hearty disgust at its puling admirers and imitators. This has been set down to hypocritical insincerity or the sourness of age: I see neither in it. It ought perhaps to be said that he "cut" a good deal of the original version. The confession of Amélie was at first less abrupt and so less effective, but the newer form does not seem to me to better the state of René himself.

25

There had been a very early French imitation of Werther itself (of the end especially), Les dernières aventures du sieur d'Olban, by a certain Ramond, published in 1777, only three years after Goethe. It had a great influence on Ch. Nodier (v. inf.), who actually republished the thing in 1829.

26

This "out-of-bounds" passion will of course be recognised as a Romantic trait, though it had Classical suggestions. Chateaubriand appears to have been rather specially "obsessed" by this form of it, for he not merely speaks constantly of René as le frère d'Amélie, but goes out of his way to make the good Father in Atala refer, almost ecstatically, to the happiness of the more immediate descendants of Adam who were compelled to marry their sisters, if they married anybody. As I have never been able to take any interest in the discussions of the Byron and Mrs. Leigh scandal, I am not sure whether this tic of Chateaubriand's has been noticed therein. But his influence on Byron was strong and manifold, and Byron was particularly apt to do things, naughty and other, because somebody else had done or suggested them. And of course it has, from very early days, been suggested that Amélie is an experience of Chateaubriand's own. But this, like the investigations as to time and distance and possibility in his travels and much else also, is not for us. Once more I must be permitted to say that I am writing much about French novels, little about French novelists, and least of all about those novelists' biographers, critics, and so forth. Exceptions may be admitted, but as exceptions only.

27

I once had to fight it out in public with a valued and valiant friend for saying something like this in regard to Edgar of Ravenswood – no doubt, in some sort a child of René's or of Nelvil's; but I was not put to submission. And Edgar had truer causes for sulks than his spiritual ancestor had – at least before the tragedy of Amélie.

28

Not in the strict theological meaning of this phrase, of course; but the misuse of it has aesthetic justification.

29

I.e. not mere "sloth," but the black-blooded and sluggish melancholy to which Dante pays so much attention in the Inferno. This deadly sin we inadequately translate "sloth," and (on one side of it) it is best defined in Dante's famous lines (Inf. vii. 121-3):

Tristi fummo Nell' aer dolce che dal sol s' allegra, Portando dentro accidioso fummo.

Had Amélie sinned and not repented she might have been found in the Second circle, flying alone; René, except speciali gratia, must have sunk to the Fourth.

30

For instance, he goes a-beaver-hunting with the Natchez, but his usual selfish moping prevents him from troubling to learn the laws of the sport, and he kills females – an act at once offensive to Indian religion, sportsmanship, and etiquette, horrifying to the consciences of his adopted countrymen, and an actual casus belli with the neighbouring tribes.

31

Its second title, ou Le Triomphe de la Religion Chrétienne, connects it still more closely than Les Natchez with Le Génie du Christianisme, which it immediately succeeded in composition, though this took a long time. No book (it would seem in consequence) exemplifies the mania for annotation and "justification" more extensively. In vol. i. the proportion of notes to text is 112 to 270, in vol. ii. 123 to 221, and in vol. iii., including some extracts from the Père Mambrun, 149 to 225.

32

Such as Eudore's early friendship at Rome, before the persecution under Diocletian, with Augustine, who was not born till twenty years later.

33

See note above.

34

There cannot be too much Homer in Homer; there may be too much outside Homer.

35

If one had only been Telemachus at this time! It would have been a good "Declamation" theme in the days of such things, "Should a man – for this one experience – consent to be Telemachus for the rest of his life – and after?"

36

In the original the word which I have translated "unbroken" is éternel, and with the adjacent éternité illustrates (as do tonnerre and étonnante in Bossuet's famous passage on the death of "Madame") one of the minor but striking differences between French and English rhetoric. Save for some very special purpose, we should consider such repetition a jingle at best, a cacophony at worst: they think it a beauty.

37

Vol. I. pp. 458, 472, notes.

38

Vol. I. p. 161.

39

When he published Le Cocu, it was set about that a pudibund lady had asked her book-seller for "Le Dernier de M. Paul de Kock." And this circumlocution became for a time popular, as a new name for the poor creature on the ornaments of whose head our Elizabethans joked so untiringly.

40

A short essay, or at least a "middle" article, might be written on this way of regarding a prophet in his own country, coupling Béranger with Paul de Kock. Of course the former is by much a major prophet in verse than Paul is in prose. But the attitude of the superior French person to both is, in different degrees, the same. (Thackeray in the article referred to below, p. 62 note, while declaring Paul to be the French writer whose works are best known in England, says that his educated countrymen think him pitoyable. —Works, Oxford edition, vol. ii p. 533.)

41

A gibe at the Vicomte d'Arlincourt's very popular novel, to be noticed below. I have not, I confess, identified the passage: but it may be in one of the plays.

42

It would not be fair to compare the two as makers of literature. In that respect Theodore Hook is Paul's Plutarchian parallel, though he has more literature and less life.

43

Charity, outrunning knowledge, may plead "Irony perhaps?" Unfortunately there is no chance of it.

44

I really do not know who was (see a little below). Parny in his absurd Goddam! (1804) has something of it.

45

And he knew something of it through Addison.

46

The straight hair is particularly curious, for, as everybody who knows portraits of the early nineteenth century at all is aware, Englishmen of the time preferred brushed back and rather "tousled" locks. In Maclise's famous "Fraserians" there is hardly a straight-combed head among all the twenty or thirty. At the same time it is fair to say that our own book-illustrators and caricaturists, for some strange reason, did a good deal to authorise the libels. Cruikshank was no doubt a wonderful draughtsman, but I never saw (and I thank God for it) anything like many, if not most, of his faces. "Phiz" and Cattermole in (for example) their illustrations to The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge sometimes out-Cruikshank Cruikshank in this respect.

47

Paul's ideas of money are still very modest. An income of 6000 francs (£240) represents ease if not affluence; with double the amount you can "aspire to a duchess," and even the dispendious Irish-French Viscount Edward de Sommerston in La Fille aux Trois Jupons (v. inf.) starts on his career with scarcely more than three thousand a year.

48

Paul's scholarship was very rudimentary, as is shown in not a few scraps of ungrammatical Latin: he never, I think, ventures on Greek. But whether he was the first to estropier the not ugly form "Cleodora," I know not. Perhaps he muddled it with "Clotilde."

49

This cult of the widow might form the subject of a not uninteresting excursus if we were not confining ourselves to the literary sides of our matter. It has been noticed before (Vol. I. p. 368), and forms one of the most curious differences between the two countries. For, putting Mr. Weller out of the question, I have known far from sentimental critics who thought Trollope's best book by no means improved by the previous experience of Eleanor Bold. Cherolatry in France, however, is not really old: it hardly appears before the eighteenth century. It may be partly due to a more or less conscious idea that perhaps the lady may have got over the obligatory adultery at the expense of her "dear first" and may not think it necessary to repeat. A sort of "measles over."

50

He also improves his neglected education in a manner not unsuggestive of Prince Giglio. In fact, I fancy there is a good deal of half-latent parody of Paul in Thackeray.

51

There might have been fifteen or fifty, for the book is more a sequence of scenes than a schematic composition: for which reason the above account of it may seem somewhat décousu.

52

I think I have commented elsewhere on the difficulty of villains. It was agreeable to find confirmation, when this book was already in the printer's hands, given at an exemption tribunal by a theatrical manager. For six weeks, he said, he had advertised and done everything possible to supply the place of a good villain, with no success. And your bad stage villain may be comic: while your bad novel villain is only a bore.